


If You'll Recall

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Series: And Other Salutations [3]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: Bisexual Josh Lyman, Coming Out, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s02e11 The Leadership Breakfast, F/F, Friendship, Gen, Happy Ending, Lesbian Donna Moss, M/M, Season/Series 02, bisexual sam seaborn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:40:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22932688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: In the wake of the Karen Cahill Incident, Donna feels like it's time she and Josh talk. Which means Josh and Sam need to talk. And that naturally means that Donna and Sam are gonna talk. Come to think of it, Cathy and Ginger have some things to say, too.-A prequel toAt Your Next ConvenienceandAt a Later Date.
Relationships: Donna Moss & Sam Seaborn, Josh Lyman & Donna Moss, Josh Lyman/Sam Seaborn, mentioned Cathy (West Wing)/Ginger (West Wing), past Donna Moss/Karen Cahill
Series: And Other Salutations [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1631137
Comments: 7
Kudos: 51





	If You'll Recall

**Author's Note:**

> after watching 2x11 i was sufficiently convinced tht donna/karen like. definitely happened. so here's the _and other salutations_ spin on tht particular situation

THE OFFICE

TUESDAY AFTERNOON

Josh leans around the door of his office, bracing himself steady against the lip of the jamb with the inside of his good hand. His shoulders draw up beneath his dress shirt, ever tighter the further he leans into the doorframe.

“Donna,” he calls with an impatient twitch of his chin. She doesn’t pick her head up from where she’s bent over her desk, phone tucked neatly into the curve of her shoulder and hand steadily moving across a swatch of paper in familiar scrawl. At her elbow is a flurry of pink slips.

“Donna,” he tries again. She looks up this time, eyes taking a beat to focus. She pulls a face—pointedly gesturing at the receiver in her hand as she yeses and nods to her unseen caller—all the while avoiding his eye. 

“When you get a minute,” he continues even as she cuts her eyes, his stubbornness rearing its head in the face of her brush off.

She shoos him, hiking her shoulder up higher while her fingers sharpen around her pen.

If she isn’t careful, he thinks, she’ll bleed blue ink everywhere, all the way down to the desk, and then he’s going to have to try and not laugh when she walks around looking like she’s had a finger in every blueberry pie.

He sighs and retreats, nudging half-heartedly around his office in the hopes that she’s delivered it and he’s just failed to notice. It isn’t that far out of the question with the precarious backlog on his desk, but he knows at the very least that she hasn’t been in his office all morning. Not since they met head-on at the start of the bullpen and she parked him at his desk. He continues the useless search out of spite.

If Josh wasn’t so used to the wind in the willows way of his and Donna’s friendship, he’d be concerned. The thing he won't admit, even to himself, is that he already is. They banter, all right, they can be a little mean-spirited, but they aren’t _evasive_ with each another. Not personally, anyway. So yeah, he’s already got his concerned badge and is working on worried. But that’s for another time, when he’s not up to his ears in political horseshit on one hand and feeling like he’s going to shake out of his own skin on the other.

The fact of the matter is: Donna always comes around. It’s just that simple.

When nearly half an hour passes and she doesn’t actually come around, he shoves back from his desk, wheels ricocheting across the floor in bumbling anticipation of what’s to come. He calls her name twice to no response before he ever crosses the threshold, irritation lighting up the back of his neck.

“Donna,” he calls for the third time, aggravation edging into his voice when he spots her with her head bowed over her desk. “Donna!”

She snaps from whatever stupor she’s in, lips already lifting for pacification, but he beats her to it.

“Are we projecting the reports directly into my brain now and I just don’t have the right cable hookup? Did I miss that visit from I.T.?”

She curses low and quick under her breath, like she wants it over with. Her hands are so steady they’re rigid where they work through the notes in front of her, and her eyes are somewhere else entirely.

She hasn’t said a word, but she’s so out of tune that some subconscious part of Josh’s brain angles him forward, ready for her to lose her balance or composure or a mixture of the two. His anger flees just as quick as it staggered in the door, leaving instead the faint impression of nausea instead. He’s got a pretty good idea what this is all about.

He bats his birdie back and forth, fingers flexing at his side as he tries to decide both what to say and how to say it until blessedly he starts shoveling words out by the mouthful, “Look, I’m sorry about, uh, y’know, with your… _y’know_. I shouldn’t have—’m sorry.”

Her eyes meet his for the first time since the courier delivered the envelope. He’s expecting to find tears braced in the corners, but he finds instead a devoid of anything. There’s nothing there except for that which he can’t name, but the force of it just about bowls him over. When she parts her lips to speak, her chin dimples.

“Josh, I think we need to talk.”

“Now?”

Autopilot mandates that she give him an exasperated look, but the weight of the moment elbows its way back into the driver’s seat. “ _Yes_.”

He’s already on his way to a loss for words, but that pushes him over. ‘We need to talk’ isn’t the thing he ever wants to hear in this building, especially not from his notably steady right-hand.

“Here?”

She shakes her head, loose hair sliding over the slick material of her blouse. It’s a shade of blue that he wants to remember the name of more than he wants to know what comes next. Aquamarine, cerulean, cobalt, sapphire, azure. “You’ve got half an hour, can we—”

“Yeah,” he starts, already nodding. “Yeah, c’mon, let me get my coat.”

Their silent walk through the White House is enough to leave anyone on edge, but Josh is still working his way up from teetering. By the time they find a secluded enough bench to sip their street-vendor coffee and watch the world walk by from, he thinks he’s going to throw his knee out from how hard his leg’s bouncing. All the things his therapist told him to do at times like these escape him, seeping right out of his ear.

“Okay,” he says, nodding in time with his own voice. He opens his mouth to say something else but loses it along the way, leaving him tutting silently. Donna usually charts their territory in quiet moments like these, puts him on the right track when he doesn’t have anywhere in particular to go.

“Josh,” she starts, lips still close to the rim of her cup. “Can you just—” She waves a hand at him, indicating the frenzy he radiates. She’s gone back to not looking him in the eye which is the worst part. Donna never defers, she’s not meek nor is she mild, and she never ducks her chin when the going gets going. But here on this bench she almost— _almost_ —looks helpless and it scares him like nothing else.

He has to force himself to sit still, but it gives her enough time to pull her thoughts together. “I want to apologize,” she says, grip tightening on her cup. “With the—it was unprofessional, it was out of line, and—” She turns to face him, keeping her eyes square on his shoulder. To be fair, he focuses on the pink in her cheeks. “It won’t happen again, I swear."

He tries for a joke because if it’s unprofessionalism that’s tugging at her sleeves, that’s fixable. That’s learning to laugh about it after the fact.

“C’mon. Sam makes a fool of himself in front of Karen Cahill so often it’s a rite of passage. It's fine!”

She’s scattered across the frostbitten grass under their heels, but her hands conduct an orchestra that swells to a crescendo in the line of her voice. “It’s not _fine_ , Josh. It's humiliating! And I keep wracking my brain trying to come up with a reason why that even begins to make sense, but I can't. So if anything it’s indescribable, but it's not fine.”

His jaw tightens and he can’t quite place why, but he thinks it has all to do with Karen Cahill and nothing to do with what Donna’s about to say. What he thinks Donna’s about to say, at any rate.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she continues, seemingly finding a roll to be on, "I know it was reckless, but I thought we were—I joked about us having a _connection_. I actually said that to Sam before I went to meet her.” She laughs now, bitter and hurried, hesitating over her point.

Josh knows there’s enough here to put two and two together and get all the things that come with four, but on the off-chance they’ve changed the rules on him, slipped some curriculum reform into an addendum that he wasn’t alerted to, he doesn’t pretend to know what’s happening.

“We slept together,” she says in a rush, five syllables the same as one. “And it wasn’t the first time.”

He nods, heart pumping blood and feeling and pain to the peachy scar on his chest.

He rubs at it absently, quietly says _okay,_ means it.

“I’m a lesbian." She’s never said it before. It’s always an implication because saying it is tempting fate just enough to be too much. Here, she damns fate and luck and relishes in the way it feels to say it out loud. She’s never been so scared and so relieved in her life.

Having found her voice, she adds, “And I wanted you to know, I wanted to—I don’t know, Josh, I wanted to tell someone in case it got out. So I could be the one to say it first, just once.”

She draws her coffee back to her mouth for a long sip and Josh is relieved to see some of her old fight coming back to the line of her shoulders.

For a moment, it’s silent between them. Not tense or cathartic or any of the things you think it’ll be when you tell someone the things you’ve been holding onto for so long. It’s an unconsecrated moment that lingers until Josh reiterates, “Okay.” This time, at least, there’s conviction behind it, there’s a taste of strength for her to lean on if she doesn’t have enough of her own. Not that that's ever an issue, Donna's got the stuff in plenty load. She should bottle it, make a fortune, get the hell out of here and away from the likes of Karen Cahill and find some real love.

“Okay?” She meets his look out of the corner of her shining eyes. It’s valiant, her effort not to cry. “You’re not—? I don’t know what I want you to be,” she admits with a wry smile.

He reaches out on reflex and pushes away the one tear she hadn’t been able to hold back. It’s a tender, fraternal gesture, an offering. _I’m not mad_ and _I’m not upset_ and _I’m glad you told me._ And he is all of those things, but he’s in overdrive, too, a latent pulse of adrenaline spitting through him.

_I don’t know what I want you to be._ Where has he heard that one before? Right, right, that’s the one he used to use on himself just so he wouldn’t have to think about any one thing too in-depth. The college years motto, penned by a Josh Lyman minus a decade.

“Donna,” he says, buoyed by her. Just her. He wants to give that back, wants to give her something to lean against and the only thing he can think of is to tell her, “I get it.”

As soon as it leaves his mouth, he realizes what he wants most is for her not to feel alone.

“ _Josh._ ” The strained line of her shoulders softens and the skin around her eyes loses some of the tension it’s been holding onto. She's not entirely relaxed, but she’s ambling toward it. “You don’t, but thank you. No, really, you’re sweet, but this is….” She doesn’t finish the thought.

“No, I mean.” He braces his elbow on his once again bouncing knee, hands clasped in front of him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he can feel something gathering at the back of his throat that tastes a bit like salted seasickness and something on the sharper side like exhilaration. Is this what she felt, he wonders? “I mean I get it.”

She raises an eyebrow, a careful maneuver, and measures off her words before doling them out. There’s enough here to take four and break it down to two plus two, but she wants to be clear on this one, no cloak and dagger. And since they’re on a roll here, the likes of which they only see under the threat of imminent danger, she thinks that even if she’s wrong, he won’t hold it against her.

“Josh,” she starts carefully, “It’s a one time offer, but I’m giving you permission to correct me if I'm wrong because it sounds like you’re telling me you’re gay.”

“Bisexual,” he corrects and it shudders out of him like a grateful sigh. He shoots her what he means to be a reassuring smile, but the moment he realizes he can’t muster one that isn’t at least slightly pained, he drops his head to look at his white-knuckling hands. “I don’t know how you made that look so easy,” he jokes.

Like her, he’s never said it before. He has acknowledged, though. Sam had said it right before or right after or somewhere in the thick of them and Josh had thrown in his agreement and that had been as close as he’d ever gotten to saying it.

Funnily enough, the only other person he’s ever thought about telling is Donna, but he’d figured it would be…funnier, or something. More lively. Not so fucking weighted if it was at all.

He should’ve gotten it over with when he was on all those painkillers, he thinks with a hint of wistfulness. Made her laugh and feel comfortable enough to tell him about herself and they wouldn’t have to do this in the cold on a bench in the heart of the middle of nowhere. But this is where they are for better or worse, so he doubles down and holds firm.

She wonders, “Have you told anyone else?”

“Sam.”

“And he was…okay?”

He doesn’t say anything for a minute and she waits for the crack, something rich like aloe to soothe the burns, but it never comes. For a horrific second, something sinks in her stomach. She can’t imagine Sam being anything other than—

“Yeah, Donna, yeah, he was great.”

He doesn’t tell her anything after that because now isn’t the time and she doesn’t follow what he thinks must be an obvious now path, too taken with her quick fire thoughts. What he doesn’t know is that she’s spent her last few days so in fear of the simple act of asking that she’d never say the first thing on this particular subject. 

“Do you think he'd talk with me?”

He hedges his chin on his shoulder, bundles his eyebrows together, starts to ask her if she’s thinking of starting a social club, but she beats him to the punch.

“I’m serious, Josh. If this gets out—” All the ways that sentence could end. ‘If this gets out, it won't go back in' seems the most on the nose.

“You haven’t done anything wrong.” Righteous indignation flares at each end of his mouth. “You _haven’t_ ,” he repeats when she doesn’t say anything. Neither of them is sure who he’s saying it for, but they silently concede they could both use it.

“I’d still feel better if I talked to him,” she murmurs over the lid of her cup, words for the snow. When she says ‘him’ she doesn’t know if she means Samuel N. Seaborn Esq. or if she just means Sam, but the thought makes her feel better than anything has in days. Comforts her over the reigning thought championing itself through the judicial process of her mind: _I could get Josh to take my letter of resignation in the end_ , known surely if not bittersweet.

“’kay.” He thumbs restlessly at the inside of his still bandaged palm. It’s less bulky than what they’d put on him that night in the ER, the wound healing up nice- and quickly. “I’ll let him know. Should I tell him why, or d’you want to?”

“You’d do that for me?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Yeah, okay.”

She can’t face down Sam Seaborn of earnest eyes and understanding words and beautiful fury for injustice and tell him this. Well, she can, she would, but she doesn’t _want to_. She doesn’t even know what this is going to do to him yet, but here, on the precipice of realizing, she knows it’ll be easier if he’s had time to mull it over. Right now she needs his clear head and his quick thinking. She needs, and for once she isn’t afraid of asking for it.

The thought makes her want to press her lips together, to put her palms over her eyes and shove the last forty-eight odd hours to a spot in the back of her mind that she’s not currently using and won’t be for the foreseeable future. And the future beyond that, for that matter. If she could just forget these days, actually, it would be for the best.

In the end her memories are still intact when she checks the watch on the inside of her wrist out of Pavlovian habit. She puts a hand on his forearm and offers a strong smile. “We should get back,” she says because the lump in her throat is too big to get a thank you around. But she knows he knows, she knows he's just as grateful as she is, even if neither of them will say it to the other's face. They're like that, stubborn to the core, yet fierce in their adoration of one another.

He lets her stand and shove her gloved hands in the pockets of her coat before he tells her, “I’ll catch up with you in a sec.”

She debates leaving him by himself, but ultimately nods and trudges ahead without him. Behind her he's a prosaic silhouette running fingers over the inside of his hand. A fierce, persistent itch has been there all morning.

His mother used to tell him—he shakes his head to dislodge the memory. What was it? If your left palm itches, you’re gonna make money soon, and if it’s the right, then you’ll lose it. Unspoken or unknown—but what really was the difference between the two—was the how. It always seems to be something trivial that side-sweeps you out of nowhere, but in reality has been building up longer than you’ve been paying attention.

That touches uncomfortably close to the situation at hand, of Donna and Karen Cahill and stacking the deck. It hits too at the way his chest caves in now over the littlest of things or the anger flares hot and bright, leaving him cored out and dampened if it leaves him at all, so he putters on to other things.

In the end he keeps coming back to how he’s going to tell Sam. There’s no good way to put a name to such an intimate betrayal. Sam could probably find a hundred words for it in the time it takes him to walk from one end of the apartment to the other, but none of them would make it any easier.

There’s another thought then, about how he’s—not lucky, lucky’s too slight, but it’s all he can come up with on short notice—to know that when he tells Sam it’ll be on the couch, their picked-over dinner on the coffee table in front of them, a game or the news or something else churning softly for the attention they give to one another instead.

It’ll be at home, is the thing. The one they share when they have the chance, with two toothbrushes in the cup by the sink and two pairs of shoes at the front door and two types of jelly in the fridge because Sam doesn’t like grape and Josh doesn’t like strawberry but they like one another mighty fine. And in that he knows that whatever they talk about, whatever they do, it’s theirs and theirs alone and never for a second would either of them worry about it snaking its way into headlines or bylines or on either side of the fold at the hands of the other because in the beginning and end they respect each other way too much for that.

And he thinks of everyone he knows, of all the varying degrees at which he knows them, the person he’d say deserves that the most is Donna. Not to her face, but y’know, in a pinch. On an anonymous survey.

She deserves the respect and all the things that come with it, the stability and the care. She deserves to go home at the end of the day with, to be with, a woman that respects her more than Karen Cahill ever did. Not that that’s too hard, apparently.

Josh doesn’t think of things in terms of fair and unfair because he works in politics and it’s not that simple anymore. It hasn’t been since the schoolyard, and even back then it was pretty muddled. But he thinks now that it’s not fair for anyone to take from Donna because she already gives everything she has in the name of a bigger picture most of them are too self-centered to see.

Donna's the best of them, hard as they all try, and she does it effortlessly because it's just the way she's wired. Those midwestern sensibilities of hers.

Right now, he concedes while he scritches his right palm, there isn’t a bigger picture. There’s an envelope in a trashcan with his name printed neatly across the center of it. There’s Donna holding humiliation in the pockets of her cheeks at her desk and probably trepidation in the palms of her hands somewhere down the line when love comes back around. There’s Josh and there’s Sam and there’s them sitting on their fucking hands, waiting to see if damage control will be needed or allowed or even a viable organ.

He pushes himself up and brushes his hands free of lingering financial consternation, dusts the guilt from his palms, scrubs over his face and digs his fingers into the crooks of his eyes like a savage kiss. It’s something he’s picked up from spending hours around Sam when he writes—when he gets frustrated, he tugs his glasses off and kneads at his eyes like he can shift the words into place like that. To his credit, that’s usually when he has a breakthrough, so what does Josh know? He tries it now in the hopes some obvious answer will arise and he can make this disappear for Donna, but nothing comes.

He tugs his phone off his belt and checks the time. He’s got a meeting with a squirrely commission head in less time than it’ll take him to get back to his office from here. He needs to track Charlie down too and try to get five minutes he promised off to a senator yesterday on the books with the President.

He’ll tell Sam tonight to expect Donna and then he’ll wait for the day he tells him they talked. He won’t tease her tomorrow, but he’ll get back to it the day after. It’ll be what it is until it isn’t, and that, he knows, is all that can be asked for.

When he squints against the sun, he sees her as a soot-toned smudge on a headache-inducing blue sky. Covered in one of those ridiculous toboggans that her roommate gives her every year for Christmas in a continued showing of quiet amity, her head’s held high.

JOSH’S PLACE

LATE THAT EVENING

True to form, Josh waits until they’re on the couch that night, trying to find a semblance of normal human life. Dinner’s on the coffee table waiting to be gathered up and discarded and there’s, of all things, infomercials on the TV that they’ve been heckling like it’s the Mets. Neither of them can actually find the remote, but tomorrow it’ll surface long enough to cast the channel over to the morning news. For now it remains lost to the lackadaisical night.

Sam has his back pressed against the far arm of the couch, elbow braced there too with his chin tucked into his hand. One socked foot is pulled under his knee and the other is firmly against Josh’s hip, a constant measure in presence. When Josh wants his attention he rests his hand over his ankle, drawing Sam’s easy eyes.

Now, his hand hovers over Sam, unsure of how to start. Deciding there's no time like the present, he meets the familiar rest and tries not to grimace. Sam looks up, faint smile on his face that drops when Josh opens his mouth to stumble over an explanation that’s more a flurry of restless movement than new information.

“Oh, God,” Sam says quietly sometime later, calamity running the races in his eyes. “Tell me you’re joking. No, I'm serious, tell me you’re joking and that you just missed the mark on this one because I can _handle_ your humor, I’ve been doing it for years, but this is— _Josh_ ,” he settles on, an almost voiceless invocation that says everything it needs to and more. There's frustration and grief and all these other things that, when tucked into those four letters, does something to Josh.

He tucks his hands over his face, agonizing in their slow descent over the ridges of his natural topography. Worry lines and laugh lines, nose and lips and chin. He thinks he says Sam's name just the same.

Some selfish part of him wants to ask if she’s going to be okay, to have reassurance handed down to him so his heart will beat normally in his chest again. But it’s just a touch too patronizing, even for him, and if he doesn’t get the answer he wants so desperately, he’s not sure he’ll be able to hold it together.

The fact of the matter is that Josh won’t be able to live with himself if Donna doesn’t come out of all of this unscathed. He won’t be able to stay if she goes, but he won’t be able to leave, either. He has this habit, apparently, of taking the blame for things entirely out of his control. A guilt complex stemming from childhood trauma or something clinical like that, his therapist hasn’t taught him all the lingo yet.

“It’s not going to come to that,” Sam says defiantly. His face pinches when he realizes not only is he out of order, but that Josh hasn’t said anything to begin with, but he plows forward anyway. “And if, God forbid, if this gets out on anyone but her terms, I'll do whatever I can, but it’s not, hey, it’s _not_ going to come to that.” And there he is, back in time.

“I don’t think you’re exactly first on the list of best delegates for this,” Josh supplies, lips screwing up into a half-assed smile. It’s pitiful humor, but Sam huffs through his nose like he does when he doesn’t want to let on that he’s amused.

“Josh,” he says, less like the warning he’d probably meant it to be.

He looks up helpless at his name, lining up a thought that Sam beats him to when he fumbles his way over from his side of the couch. Bringing his chest to rest against the side of Josh’s shoulder, he hooks his chin there too and lets his eyes close behind his glasses. The harsh colors of the TV crouch across his face, tinting half the same hue that Donna’s blouse had been. Aquamarine. he’s a steady counterweight welcomed greedily if not guiltily.

Tucking his nose against the nearest part of Sam’s head, Josh hopes it translates into empathy, or comfort, or something other than the frenzy of anxiety that's been bundled under his skin. Instead, he finds his own comfort, the reassuring smell of that ridiculous shampoo Sam uses. Scent: prep-school alumnus, or maybe just green apple. Josh is used to it cut through by the overwhelming heat of a steamy bathroom or added into the smell of the clean linen detergent that loiters on their pillowcases, but here it’s whole.

Sam clears his throat, little huffs of breath, before asking, “She was okay?”

“Handled it like a champ.” It’s a false platitude for something that’s much bigger than this, but he doesn’t want to say that he saw real fear on her today. That makes it too real.

A belated second later, Sam quietly adds, “Did you tell her…?”

There’s a spot on Josh’s back that aches and aches after Rosslyn, and when Sam finds it, courted by the soft tensing of muscles, he flattens his palm and pushes against it as much as he can without causing any more pain.

“I’m not that much of an asshole, y’know.” A studious observation. He’ll figure out how somewhere down the line when it doesn’t feel like spitting on a grave. She’ll probably find more humor in it than she should, but it’ll be worth it to see her give him that grin.

“I do happen to know that, actually,” Sam murmurs warmly, leaving a kiss to the seam on the sleeve of Josh’s t-shirt. “But you’re still pretty damn close.” That earns him the sensation of laughter combing through his hair.

“Just, tell her she’s gonna be all right,” Josh says under his breath, picking up steam with everyone to follow. “Because that’s the thing with Donna, she doesn’t want to hear that, but you gotta tell her anyway. She’s got this, it’s like retroactive hearing, it’ll sink in once she’s done debating you.”

"I won't lie to her," Sam says, convicted and sure. His and Donna's friendship has always been something of a mystery to Josh, but it's an undeniable constant that he got used to a long time ago. "But I don't think that'll be a lie. I do think she'll be fine." 

For a curious minute, Josh thinks that’s all that needs to be said. That they’ve weathered this particular storm, but he realizes through the haze of his heart beating rhythmically in his chest and the weight of Sam against him, that he can hear Sam thinking. It’s always been a subtle cue: he gets these specific lines in his forehead and there might as well be whirring in the air. He usually likes it, because first comes the unmistakable signs and then the dizzying train of thought.

But it’s all Josh can hear, that and the ticking from the clock in the kitchen, the promise of _but wait, there’s more_ from the TV, the jagged hum of the fan in the bedroom. Silence has never been a problem between them, but today has him all riled up and he can’t stand it. Can't stand that he can't figure out what Sam's turning over in his head. Can't stand the restless thing pacing in his chest. Can't stand, above all, that he doesn't know what to say.

“It’s—” Sam starts, exhaling through his nose the way he does when he’s suitably pissed off but trying to stay diplomatic. “It’s a fucking joke.

“No, no, it’s—it’s the worst kind of betrayal that there is, Josh. And if Karen _Cahill_ isn’t, I mean if she really isn’t, she should be appalled. It’s petty and vindictive and even if it didn’t read like a threat, it’s still so amazingly naïve that I’m worried about the state of the papers.

“What if you weren’t you, Josh? What if you were anyone else and it had gotten into the wrong hands? These things, they don’t just happen once, Jesus Christ, this ruins lives and I, I’d like to think that Karen would have even a modicum of rational thought before she did something like that.”

His hand spasms where it rests on Josh’s back, anger and malcontent and fear—Josh knows it’s there and he knows that when Sam calms down he’ll know it’s there, too. But it’s hard not to let this strike fear into them, it’s too close to home, too close to all the things they’d weighed at the beginning but ultimately stifled so they could enjoy one another’s company Monday through Sunday and back again without three’s company of fear ruining them.

“It’s not gonna ruin Donna’s.”

For all the worry, he saw relief flush her face all the same when she told him and nothing that brings that much ease should ruin a life. He knows that firsthand, doesn’t he? Looking at Sam here under low-light he does, at least.

“No, it’s not.”

“Then I’ll send her your way. I’ve heard it’s a real morale boost when you’re at the helm.”

Sam laughs. It’s dimmer than usual, but it’s there, and though Josh is three quarters of the way to wherever it is he’s headed by way of the intermittent feeling of losing himself, he knows it’ll shake out fine. Has to believe that if he’s ever gonna sleep again.

He ducks his head to work a quiet kiss into Sam’s mouth, the kind that lets him get his hand on that spot on the side of Sam’s neck where he can feel his pulse. It’s something of an anchor point. Sam crooks his hand around the back of Josh’s neck, keeps it there even when they pull back.

It’s been—he tallies off the months in his head—seven months this go ‘round. Seven months and he knows that he loves Sam just as surely now as he had all the other times. Difference being that he wasn’t, y’know, as worldly back then. Hadn’t seen all the ways a life could end, stopped short of any kind of finish line, loose threads flapping in the wind.

So he thinks what the hell in the least manic way possible. Throws caution to the wind in perhaps the most responsible way he ever will. Josh is notorious for the quick bounce back as it is, and he wants, he needs, for Sam to know that this isn’t something he’s going to use to tuck tail and run. This right here is it for him if it's it for Sam.

“I love you,” Josh rests to the corner of Sam’s mouth. “D’you know that?”

“I had a pretty good idea,” Sam confides, mouth curving up like Josh’s just revealed the world’s worst kept secret—and maybe he has—breath touching his cheek as his fingers press into his wrist. “Are you by _any_ chance aware I love you, too?”

“I had a little money on it.”

“Get yourself something nice, huh?”

Josh cracks a half-dimpled smile, shaking his head in incredulity. He didn't lie when he said Sam was a morale boost. These moments have talked him down from stark worry and he knows they'll do the same for Donna, too.

THE COMMUNICATIONS BULLPEN

EITHER THURSDAY NIGHT OR FRIDAY MORNING, VERY LATE OR VERY EARLY

It’s the kind of nighttime quiet that makes Donna’s hairs stand on end. Everyone’s cleared up and out, leaving her lamp the last one on until the moment she snuffs it, plunging the room into the night tide. Donning her coat in the dark, she maneuvers her hair out of the collar as she steps over to Josh’s office.

“I’m heading home. You need anything else before I leave?”

He looks up with bleary eyes. “Nah, but I’ll have options when you get back.”

She takes the ribbing with a grateful smile and wishes him a good night. He’d been kind the day before, which for them mostly meant that he kept quiet, but she’s glad to be back to their regular.

Snagging her bag on her way back past her desk, she tucks it under her arm. She’s ready to actually follow through on her sentiment, but there’s one last thing she knows she needs to do. That she’s been putting off, really, even if a day could probably be called considering and not stalling.

When she gets to the Communications bullpen, Donna finds that she’s not, in fact, the only one left from her staff tier. Ginger’s got her elbows braced on her desk, fingers dug into her hair and eyes tiredly flicking over something unseen in front of her. She’s so out of it that Donna doesn’t think she even knows there’s anyone else in the room.

Cathy’s on her feet, sweater wrapped around her waist and flicking through a bundle of stapled papers with a highlighter in tow. She looks over, a late smile on her lips. Her lipstick’s faded around the greeting she mouths over Ginger’s head in an effort not to stir her partner.

Donna takes the cue and inclines her head to Sam’s closed door with a curious brow tucking up her forehead. It earns her a nod from Cathy, who ushers her in from across the room with a thumbs up before returning to her mark-ups.

Pausing at the door, Donna knocks lightly as she spins the knob and peeks her head in, waiting still for the faint _come in_ , which she receives prompt as ever. When he looks up, he startles, eyes wild Cornflower blue.

“Hey,” he whispers, making himself busy clicking the lid of his laptop shut and removing his glasses. They skitter uselessly against the desktop when he tosses them there in measured carelessness.

Donna nudges the door shut behind her and takes a wary seat, her thumb nail picking at a piece of lint caught on the leg of her pants while she tries some measure of _pluck_. A thimble or a thumb of it, a spritz or a sprinkle. Plucky like a little orphan Victorian boy, that's what she needs.

Thoroughly, Sam asks, “How are you?” quiet, curious blinks marking the seconds that pass while he waits for her to conjure up the words.

Moonlight touches the fine wisps of hair that sit out of place around his hairline and top of his head. He looks tired, but jaunty—and also desperately in need of a haircut, but that’s not the point. The point is that she can already tell they’re going to have a very different meeting than she’d been psyching herself up for.

“Fine,” she says, but it sounds faint even to her own ears.

He frowns just to prove her point.

In the spirit of interrupting him before they can careen into pity and she loses her carefully constructed calm, she asks, “Josh told you everything?” Rehashing the details is probably the easiest thing she could have to suffer through right now.

“Yeah, he—yeah, he told me everything.” He slips in an apology before she can stop him, but the simplicity of it barely registers. She’d gotten most of her easily triggered hurt out before she ever approached Josh.

“I just want to know what I’m looking at here, Sam. Don’t sugarcoat it just because you’re hopelessly charmed by me, give it to me straight.”

His mouth quirks at that, a little sad but a little proud, too. “For starters, can I tell you something?”

“I know this doesn’t fall under attorney-client privilege.”

“No, that’s not—” Despite himself, he laughs, fingers rattling across the arm of his chair in time. “I was trying to come out to you. See, I hear it’s going around so I figured I’d hop on the bandwagon, have the bisexual conversation so you know I'm not talking out of my ass completely.

“But now that you mention it, I’m glad you know the parameters of attorney-client privilege. You’re already doing better than about ninety-percent of people I’ve interacted with since they handed me my degree.”

 _Yeah, Donna, yeah, he was great._ Her chin twitches in a tiny, amused shake of her head. It's a wonder they all were on the same page as bad as they were at getting through these conversations with all the pertinent information intact.

“That many?”

She’ll swear up and down ‘til the day she dies that his eyes actually twinkled with unsung laughter. “You’d be surprised.”

“I don’t think I would.” After all, she spends her days hearing all the things politicians say in-between primping them up for one another, she’s seen her fair share of stunning displays.

He hums, concedes her point. There’s a bloated pause before he launches right in, attacking the conversation with late-night wired hands that work deftly at the buttons around his wrists. Not looking up, he starts, “So, with that out in the open, I think you and I both know there’s not a lot of room here to turn around without knocking a vase off the table. Shatter the whole thing, make a mess on the carpet, you get what I’m saying.”

“Honestly? I’m tired of thinking about it myself. I want a second opinion.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, how long did it go on between the two of you?” He pats his first sleeve in place around his elbow and turns to the next, hazarding her a quick glance that tumbles out from behind his eyelashes.

“We didn’t really _go on_. It was just when we crossed paths. If I called it a fling that would be too serious.”

“Yeah, I know that one.”

Donna sinks back into the chair, her back pressing hard against the curvature. A sigh lifts from her chest, touches the backs of her teeth.

“I don’t know what I’m doing, Sam.” She doesn’t know if she means in his office or in life or if it’s just a thing people say when they aren’t sure of if there’s anything to say at all, but she knows she means it somehow.

A look passes over his features. She can tell by the way his hands slap his sleeve into sloppy place and come to rest in front of him on his desk that he’s about to have one of his capital M moments. The ones she really doesn’t think are fair at all because he’s got the charisma and charm and _spunk_ all on top of the fact that he’s the second best persuasive speaker in the building.

If she’s lucky, he’ll at least have it in conjunction with rambling Sam, her favorite of his vernacular personas.

“You know what I think? I think you’re incredibly persistent, and I think you’re a good egg with a good heart, and Donna, I think you’re going to be fine. I really do. And, and just hear me out before you start the debating—Josh warned me there would be debating, of which I’m by no means opposed to—but I think what Karen did was, of all the things it was, I think what she did was a dirty pitch and I don’t believe she’s got any more in her. Especially not after the dignity you’ve handled this with. If you’d gone to her pleading or angry, we’d be in a very different situation, but we’re not, we’re here.

“So I don’t actually think there’s anything for us to talk about. Not on this subject, at least. This looks like an isolated event, and on the off chance it isn’t, you aren’t going anywhere. Not while I’ve got a say, not while Josh does. I also think it’s highly likely that Cathy and Ginger would make my life a living hell without you here, so you’re covered on all four fronts. I wish you'd known that before now, I wish I'd said it sooner. I mean it, Donna, you're one of ours and that means something.”

She ignores the stubborn emotion pricking at her eyes because she has a rule about not crying in Sam’s office that she just instated to think about. “Did Josh really tell you there’d be debating?” she asks incredulously, her voice breaking for laughter.

He gives her a buzzing smile, a graceful spread of his tarot card hands with humor rising in his three of cups. “There’s a possibility that he said that just to get me riled up.”

“Well, you’re sufficiently riled. You called me an egg somewhere there in that pep talk.”

“A _good_ egg. I believe I specified you were a morally sound egg.”

“No matter how you spin it, I don’t want to be an egg, Sam.”

His smile softens and he says, “I don’t know if I’ve ever told you, but that’s what I love about you, you stick to your beliefs.”

He hasn't ever told her that, but it's nice to hear. Especially now, when she’s second guessed every move she's made for the last few days, all the way from what the hell to do about this whole thing down to how she spreads cream cheese on a bagel.

But now she can feel all her fated strings twanging back into place. This, all of this, was less a warning shot and more a showing of true colors. She can course correct from here, take to heart the lessons learned, and move on. She should probably put ‘hope I don’t run into Karen any time soon’ on that list, but it’s just a hasty mock-up for now that all means the same in the end. And what an end it is.

The night before she hadn’t been able to sleep. When she finally had, she’d dreamt an endless line of phone calls that ended just as soon as she answered. It was a nervous wreck dream, flavored like the ones she used to get in high school where she’d sit down at a desk to take a test and realize that she didn’t know any of the answers and all the questions were written in German for good measure.

All to say that this one in particular woke her up fifteen minutes before her alarm, leaving her to the silence of her apartment and the lingering movement in her fingers to type up a resignation letter.

But in the smaller of two offices, on the other side of the desk from one of her greatest friends who’s patiently waiting for her to catch up with the thoughts in her head, she deletes every word she’d thought about writing. No deepest regrets, no thanks for time spent. It’s all gone and she remains right where she's supposed to be.

_One of ours._

She sighs, a deep, full exhale, and pushes to her feet.

Untangling himself from his seat to present a full apparition before her, he grabs the lip of the desk to steady himself on his feet.

She thinks about telling him to go home, but decides not to press her luck. Her concern must be inked across her face, though, because he cocks his head to the side just enough for the uncategorized hairs on top of his head to fall over themselves.

“I’ll get out of here soon,” he promises with a magnanimous smile. It’s eerie just how good he is at that.

“Will you make sure Josh isn’t still here before you leave? He’s been holed up in his office all night.”

Something funny flits through his eyes then, but she can’t put her finger on it. It dashes errantly around his face, but his smile stays the same as he notches his hip against his desk and crosses his arms over his chest. “Yeah, I’ll swing through.”

Without thinking about it too hard, she rocks forward and gives him a light hug that he returns without batting an eye, quickly unfolding his arms to wrap around her. She can smell his shampoo—apple—and some kind of aftershave that catches in her throat.

“Thank you,” she says over his shoulder, giving him an extra squeeze before pulling back, just shy of the threshold for embarrassment. He doesn’t say anything else, just pats her elbow sweetly and lets her walk away. It's possibly the kindest gift he could have given her.

When Donna pulls the door shut behind her, Ginger finally looks up, confusion wrinkling her entire face. She looks to Cathy for confirmation that she's not seeing things; given the hour and her caffeine to sleep ratio, there's a very real possibility of hallucinations.

“Everything okay?” Cathy asks, dropping her clipboard onto Ginger’s desk and leaning against it in a near exact copy of the way Sam had just been standing.

Donna can’t help her amusement, and it leads to trying and failing not to think about what mannerisms she could have possibly picked up from Josh. Her yell has gotten a little more pointed, maybe. No, even better, sometimes they’ll have a standoff through the doorway to his office and he’ll have his hands on his hips and she’ll have her knuckles braced against hers—because _some_ people actually pick up the papers lying around and can’t just put their open hands on their hips willy-nilly—and it’s like looking into one of those funhouse mirrors. She hadn’t done that before him, that she knows.

“Donna?” Ginger reiterates, her face softening in worry.

They’re all rarely at a loss for words around one another, so it’s a fair assumption, but one that Donna wants to lay to rest promptly.

Before that week, Cathy and Ginger were the only ones who knew about whatever it was she and Karen had been getting at. Now, Donna doesn’t even know if the gossip mill had made it to them with what happened to start this hellish week.

It sits primly on her shoulder, craning it’s head around to taunt her eye-to-eye—not how they’ll take it, but the fact that they have to take it at all. She’s starting to appreciate the sheer embarrassment of the situation as it applies to her. The anger too, but that's best reserved for when she can really dig into it. As she stands, she's already knockout tired. The most she can do for anger is serenade it with her snores.

“You’re gonna be here a while?”

Ginger groans. “Don’t remind me.”

“Tell me what we’re doing,” Donna instructs as she sets to pulling her coat back off. She’s not going home after all, but she finds that she’s not that upset about it. And tired? She can work through tired. “And I’ll fill you in.”

“You’re sure?” Cathy asks, palming her elbow. “You got here before us this morning, I know you did.”

“Are you seriously turning down my help?”

“I didn’t say _that_. Did you hear me say that, Ginger?”

“I didn’t hear you say that.”

Donna pulls up a chair and kicks her shoes off into to the pile beside Ginger’s desk. She’s passed a clipboard and a highlighter, instructions rolling off Cathy’s tongue as she sets back to her usual drowsy movements. Ginger droops when she gets tired, Cathy paces, and Donna, apparently, takes on work from other departments. What a world it is.

Cathy strikes through something on her papers, the sound high and dry, and she pulls a face. “Okay,” she says, finding Donna’s eyes. “Start talking.”

All these years of writing memos and Donna’s gotten fairly good at summarizing, so she catches them up as best she can, omitting here and there things she's been told in confidence.

Once it’s all said and done, Ginger vehemently assures her, _If I weren’t so exhausted, and we were at least a decade younger, we’d be egging her house_ , in a way that reminds Donna acutely of a Halloween she’d spent in the late 80s lobbing eggs of her own. Cathy, on the other hand, silently fumes. She looks like she wants to launch her clipboard across the room or maybe down a margarita in one straight shot, but those looks are so similar on anyone with the word assistant in their title that Donna can’t tell the difference.

Despite their anger on her behalf, neither of them give too much time to it, instead immediately switching to whatever they can think of to get her to laugh or rant or sing along. Anything to get her mind off of it, and it's the second kindest gift of the night. She's going to have to write thank you cards at this rate, damn her social savvy.

They finish their work sometime later, voices sleep-slurred and passionate while they bundle in their assorted winter wear and make sense of the pile of shoes still on the floor. Ginger nearly topples into their hill of matching black flats, the only thing stopping her Cathy's hands on her waist. It's not that funny, but to them it's enough to make them all shriek with laughter that can probably be heard out in the street.

It isn’t enough to stir Sam, apparently. Not even enough to get him to peek his head out the door, which plays on Donna's concern like a fiddle. She wants to check in on him one last time, but elects not to, if only for the fact that she knows he must be writing. If he is, then any attempt she makes at coaxing him out of his office will either be ignored, or he'll snap at her, and that's the last thing she wants. It'll be awkward for the both of them, and a Sam that feels like he needs to apologize is a menace, sincerity and regret wafting off him like the new eau de parfum.

Cathy kills the lights, effectively stirring Donna from her melodramatic contemplation. She and Ginger wait by the door for her, looping their arms through hers to tug her toward freedom. They never let her fall behind, keeping up a steady stream of murmurs because not one wants to admit that the West Wing is daunting after everyone's gone home.

It’s only once they get to the parking lot that any of them let go, Donna breaking off to head for the subway while Ginger tries to help Cathy remember where exactly they parked that morning. Carpooling in the name of efficiency and environmental protection is an easy cover-up for a relationship, after all. A work appropriate euphemism to boot.

When she goes to throw her final goodbyes over her shoulder, Donna catches a glimpse of Josh and Sam out of the corner of her eye. They're not doing much more than meandering out the doors, their hands jammed in their coat pockets and their voices appropriately low for the fact that it's two in the morning, but she's glad to see them leaving at all. It's no secret that Sam stows away on Toby's couch overnight when he thinks of it, and Josh—well, Josh is self-explanatory, isn't he?

She throws a wave to them too and watches as Sam jabs a knobby elbow into Josh's side and gestures toward her with his chin. He waves a leather gloved hand and Josh throws his own bare one up like he's hailing a taxi, but she appreciates the effort all the same.

It's a city-blackened sky blur from there up until she throws her keys in the dish by the door. She trudges through the apartment without any regard for sound. Her roommate's been at work for a few hours by now, and their downstairs neighbor had slept through the fire alarm on more than one occasion. Her ragged trek wouldn’t even wake his illicit dog that he definitely wasn’t supposed to have.

She falls into bed diagonally, on top of the covers, still clad in the day's clothes down to her shoes. Actually, she’s thinking her left shoe might not be hers after all, but drowsily she rules she can solve that one tomorrow. They hit the floor one by one and she manages to shimmy herself halfway underneath the duvet before she falls asleep.

That night, she sleeps a dreamless sleep. It’s only about four hours worth, but she'll take what she can get.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm having a hell of a time w my writer's block on part 4 (which is a v happy donna/joey-centric fic) so i have no idea when that'll be up but it's cooking!
> 
> i'm on tumblr @foxmulldr


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